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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, a guide to smarter, more ethical shopping for the holiday season.
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Basu: Oh my God. I can't believe this is happening. I'm catching a live delivery.
[DOOR BELL CHIMING]
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Basu, Narrating: Yesterday, five packages arrived at my house.
Basu: Hi, there!
Basu, Narrating: Separately.
Basu: That's probably for me.
[LAUGHTER]
Basu: So many packages these days. Thanks a lot! Take care.
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Basu, Narrating: Today, it's just been one so far. That brings this week's delivery count up to nine. And if you can't tell, I'm kinda horrified. I'm one of those people who knows it's probably not great to do all of my shopping online. But I'm having a baby in a few weeks, and gifts are starting to roll in, and it seemed like a good idea to buy myself a comfy house robe and a few other things.
Not to mention, the holidays make this one of the busiest times of the year for online shopping. All of this got me thinking about how we shop, why we shop, and how so much of the stuff we buy for ourselves and for others ends up becoming junk. Earlier this week, we asked you, our listeners, to tell us how you have reevaluated your shopping and gift-giving habits in recent years.
Listener 1: Hello, my name is Robin Spencer.
Listener 2: I'm Lizz.
Listener 3: Hi, my name is Julie Duncan.
Listener 1: And I'm calling to answer the question, "What's changed about my buying habits?"
Listener 2: …because I became extremely exhausted with the stress and waste that comes with it.
Listener 3: We've really just tried to make a conscious shift from the idea of gifts as stuff to gifts as time that we give people.
Listener 1: I canceled my Amazon Prime membership.
Listener 4: We just plan a trip where we all go together, and then we have an experience. And then the way you pay for a present is you just pay for a meal.
Listener 5: Instead of spending our Christmas budget on things under the Christmas tree, we take a small vacation.
Basu, Narrating: So, with the holidays coming up, I wanted to talk to Amanda Mull from "The Atlantic," who's been writing for years about how the internet has shaped shopping and how online shopping has shaped us.
Amanda Mull: Right now, we're sort of at a logical extreme of online shopping. It is everywhere. It is sort of inescapable.
Basu, Narrating: I asked Amanda to explain all the shadowy mechanics behind shopping online from the psychological tricks to the environmental harms and what we can do to be more aware, more ethical consumers.
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Mull: One of the greatest coups of online shopping has been the truly enormous amount of data that retailers are able to assemble and able to access from third parties about shoppers. If retailers figure out from your web searches, from your internet activity, from the other products that you've browsed that you have bought a new house, or that you're moving to a new city, or that you're graduating from college, having a baby, retiring, you know, any of these life events, no matter how big or how small, careful data analysis can figure out all of that like down to the person, and figure out what it is that they should be offering you as a result. And these are, you know, situations in which people are stressed out, and that creates like a moment where people are a little bit vulnerable and a little bit open to suggestion. And that, that is really powerful. The reality that we have to perceive all of this stuff all day long Like, it really wears at people's resolve. It wears at their better judgment. And then once you do decide that like, "Okay, maybe I, I will buy this. Maybe I, maybe I do need this," you can go from having that thought to having bought something at lightspeed.
Basu: Yeah, sure. I mean, a lot of what I'm thinking about as I'm listening to you describe this experience is just how many emotional words you just used. It sounds like there's a lot of emotional things at play that retailers are using to their advantage.
Mull: Right. Absolutely. The history of advertising is the history of talking to people about their emotions, about the self, about possibility, about adequacy, about social expectation. This goes all the way back to the very beginning of the consumer system in the 19th century when advertising was developed to set expectations about what types of products people needed because there were suddenly a lot of products available that didn't have an obvious market for them. Industrialization creates surplus, and it continues to create surplus. So, you have to create a narrative that is then sort of backfilled into the products that you have about why somebody might need them. And in a lot of situations, there's no, like, particularly rational reason that somebody might need them. There's no physical need. So, you have to create emotional need. And it can be very, very manipulative.
Basu: Yeah. Well, another concept that you have written about often is this idea of reducing friction [CHUCKLES] and how online retailers reduce friction in your online shopping process. What do you, what do you mean by that? And can you explain what that means?
Mull: Friction is the sort of the consumer psychological term for anything that in the purchase process and the browsing process that makes you sort of stop and wait for a moment. So that can be the need to, like, get up and go get your credit card out of your wallet in order to enter the number. It can be entering your address. It could be trying to remember your login credentials. So, retailers, what they want to do is to make processes as frictionless as possible. This removal of friction goes really far beyond the bounds of just like online checkout. It also goes to lots more products have stretch in them now. So, you don't have to worry about sizing as much. It's easier for consumers to think about buying that online without trying it on. So, you reduce friction. And you get like a really smooth process from becoming aware to a product to having it on the way to you.
Basu: Yeah. So, what's your advice to people on how they should navigate online shopping more mindfully, knowing that there's these, there's all these tricks being used really, and that they're very effective tricks?
Mull: Right. I think one of the best things that you can do is not saving your credit card information in websites, in your browser, in your phone. Force yourself to get up and get your credit card and type it in every time you buy something.
Basu: [CHUCKLES] I love that. That is so inconvenient for, for a reason! [CHUCKLES] For a good reason.
Mull: It's so inconvenient, but it's one of those things where it's like, if this is something that like, I have been goaded into putting some stuff in my cart because there's some coupon codes and like, this looked interesting in a picture and like, I'm not sure if I'll like it, but maybe… Then in those situations, if I have to get up and get my credit card, quite frequently, more often than not, I go, "I don't really need this. This isn't worth it. What am I doing here? How did I get here? What, what did TikTok do to me?" Like… [CHUCKLES]
Basu: Yeah. Yeah. You know what? Forget it. [CHUCKLES]
Mull: Right. And it can feel very old school, very retro. But it's a really useful tactic if you are someone who has problems with impulse control in that way.
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Basu, Narrating: There are two major dynamics at play here that we gotta talk about. One, we are obsessed with consumerism. The average American household receives about 3 packages a week. The second is retailers are overproducing like mad.
Mull: You get retailers that are just ordering from their vendors a lot more products than they actually anticipate to sell to consumers. A lot of it is bought on projections, and we saw during the pandemic how easily those projections can sort of go awry because of world events, because of changes in culture, because of things like climate change affect what people want to buy. And all of this requires just an extra layer of products that is never even anticipated to be sold to a consumer.
Basu, Narrating: Those two dynamics, consumers over-buying and retailers over-stocking, have huge environmental costs. According to one estimate from the non-profit forest conservation group Canopy, more than three billion trees are cut down each year to make paper packaging, not to mention plastic bubble wrap, Styrofoam, those air cushions things.
Mull: And then you also get the freight necessary to move those things around the world, and that requires gasoline usage. It requires lots more trucks on the road.
Basu, Narrating: It even impacts our infrastructure. More trucks means more wear and tear on roads and bridges. It also means more idling, as deliveries get made 12, 13, 14 hours a day.
Mull: They put chemicals into the air in largely residential neighborhoods because those are where the deliveries are happening in most cases.
Basu, Narrating: And so far, we're just talking about getting the stuff to you. But what happens when you return it? On average, we return anywhere from a third to half of the stuff we buy online. Amanda recently visited a facility that handles online returns.
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Mull: There's this whole industry out there that is like largely unseen by the general public that's called reverse logistics. And that is like the process of taking all of the stuff that consumers didn't want or that stores weren't able to sell and moving it sort of like back up through the supply chain from whence it came. Like, roughly, that's what it does. So, when you return a product, when you order something online and it doesn't fit, or it's like a little wonky or like the image of it was misleading, you print out your prepaid label. You stick it on the package. And I think what most people assume is that it goes back to the brands that sold it. And that's usually not the case. Some of the biggest retailers, your Amazons, Walmarts, Targets, like basically those big three in the U.S., do handle their own returns and do their own reverse logistics at least as so far as like receiving the returns back. But for pretty much every other retailer you find, mall retailers, smaller online retailers, whoever, if you send something back through any kind of shipping, it's going to go to a third-party facility that processes returns. And what they do is they inspect by hand every single piece that comes back from these retailers, and they figure out if it can be sent back to the retailer to be sold again, if it needs to be set aside to be liquidated to a discount retailer, which is where your stores like T.J. Maxx get a lot of their inventory, or if it can be donated, or if it should be recycled, or if it should be sent to a landfill. And that process, like… There's a ton of machinery involved in it. There's a ton of data analysis involved in it. But also, there are just people who have to open these packages and figure out if you wore that sweater or not, if you wore that pair of pants. You know, you said you didn't on your return slip. Were you lying?
Basu: Do they have a deodorant streak on them?
Mull: Right, right. Anything like that. Are there spots? Are there rips? Et cetera. And a human has to do that for every piece that comes through any of these facilities.
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Basu, Narrating: In the U.S., only about 15% of textiles like clothing are recycled or reused. A lot of our unsold clothes end up getting exported to low-income countries, supposedly for resale there. But Amanda says we're really just exporting our textile-waste problem, contributing to giant piles in other countries' landfills.
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Mull: There are famous ones in Ghana, in Chile. And when you look at those clothing piles and get close to them… Like, there's been some really good investigative journalism about these piles specifically because they are sort of like landscape features at this point. They're so huge. Um, most of it is unsold clothing. Most of it still has the tags on. So, like, there's a story about like end consumer waste in all of this, but there's also a story about the wastefulness of the system inherently in how much overproduction has to happen in order for all of these systems to function.
Basu: Can I tell you about two conveniences that I feel deeply worried about? [CHUCKLES] One of them is free returns for sure, which we've been talking about, but the other one is expedited shipping. And I feel very conflicted when I'm presented with an option for expedited shipping where sure, it would be nice to receive the thing sooner. And sometimes, it's even presented at the same cost or at no extra cost to me. I just can't help but think that these two things, expedited shipping and free returns, are doing a whole lot of harm.
Mull: The first thing I would say about the sort of like preponderance of like expedited shipping and free returns is that you are paying for those things. You are not paying for them separately. They are not a line item on your invoice. But one of the first things that when I visited the returns liquidator in Pennsylvania, what they said is that, like, our services are not inexpensive. We're good at what we do, but it costs a lot of money to accept this volume of returns and then process them. And consumers are paying for that. So, if everything seems really expensive to you, especially things that you're buying online, it is because, in part, that all of these logistical services are baked into the price of everything you buy no matter how scrupulous you personally are. You know, retailers keep careful data on how these options and these incentives affect how people shop, affect how users interact with their website, how much they buy, et cetera. If you can just opt out of those things, whether that's add a couple more things to your order in order to get free shipping or sign up for their loyalty rewards program that lets them constantly bombard you with advertisements and inducements to buy in order to get free returns… Whatever those things are, know that retailers are offering them because they are likely to make you behave in ways that are good for them and not for you.
Basu: So, what can we the consumers do if we are hearing all of this and are really taken aback by just the environmental footprint of what we are doing with all of our buying and returning? I mean, what's some advice on, on how to shop more mindfully in this way?
Mull: One of the best things that you can do is to switch your modes of consumption to secondhand sources as often as possible. Secondhand sources are really plentiful now.
Basu: Thrift shopping, consignment shopping, that kind of thing.
Mull: Right. There's thrift shops, consignment shops. If you want to do in person, which I think is even better because you can see stuff before it ends up in your home, I think that is a great option because that is stuff that otherwise would be probably headed for a landfill because if it doesn't move within a pretty short period of time, especially the big thrift corporations, your Goodwills, your Salvation Armies, they move on from the stuff that's on their floor pretty quickly. The average for the industry is about 30 days that something has before it will be sent for recycling. And we know that like a lot of stuff that is sent for recycling is not recycled because it just can't be in any efficient or effective way. So, if you're buying stuff from secondhand sources and in person secondhand, that's, I think, the best that you can do. There's also lots of platforms online, Poshmark, eBay, Depop, The RealReal, that sort of aggregate a lot of things in a single spot and make it easily searchable. So, if you're looking for a specific thing from a specific brand, that's a great option. And a lot of professional resellers that use these platforms are getting things directly from the types of liquidators that I visited on my trip to Pennsylvania to see how returns are processed. So, on Poshmark, I know you can find a lot of like brand-new Athleta workout clothing for pretty low prices. It has tags on it. You can find a lot of J.Crew that way, Anthropologie, all of these things. There are lots of new products out there from secondhand sources. And I think that like shifting your modes of consumption in that way is helpful because it changes how the original retailer views their audience. It changes the expectations for how much they should be producing, for how much they should be putting into their warehouses. So, if you can move your dollars out of those stores, overproduction becomes incrementally less profitable. And I think also looking at things like buy nothing groups are a great idea not only on a financial end, but increases the likelihood that the things that you're giving away or bringing home will actually be used, will actually stay out of a landfill for longer than they might have otherwise. You know, it is sort of the old thing of like going to ask your neighbor for a cup of sugar instead of getting on Instacart and asking a gig worker to bring you a cup of sugar from the grocery store.
Basu: [CHUCKLES] This is the ultimate modern version of that story.
Mull: Right, right. Yeah. It's… You know, all of these systems serve to alienate us from the people around us. That is like ultimately what happens at the end of all of this, is we become inured to the idea that shopping is our best way out of a lot of different types of problems, that it's the best way out of being nervous about becoming a new mom, that it's the best way out of entering the job market, that it's the best way out of all of these sort of like common worries and life transitions. And actually, a lot of what we need in those situations is the people around us and their help and their generosity. And the sort of knee-jerk reaction that we should isolate from, from neighbors, from the people in our towns, things like that, and then look to Amazon, or Walmart or Target to solve those problems instead is… Again, it is one of those things that does not serve you. It serves the people who sell products, who are marketing to you, who have all this data on you. And the best way to resist that is to look to other humans.
Basu: Hmm. We are down to the final stretch of holiday shopping. Do you have any tips for people, ideas on how they can approach their holiday buying differently, more ethically, more sustainably?
Mull: I would think about the people in your life, and what you value about them, and what they love, and what they would enjoy and try to find things that are not something you order from a website if at all possible. You know, there's a lot of ways to give people gifts. And the idea that that the best gift is something brand-new and expensive is something that I think, especially you know, parents with little kids have the opportunity to reset and that we have the opportunity to reset with each other as adults. So, instead of buying a bunch of Starbucks gift cards or something like that for your coworkers, maybe make some cookies. You know, take somebody out for a for a nice meal or something like that. Take the kids to the zoo, something. I think that one thing consumerism does is dull creativity and dull our innate sense of what is valuable and what we can provide that as a value to others. And I think that, you know, it's not the most fun answer in the world. It's fine to buy people gifts. I don't have any, like… [CHUCKLES] I don't have any personal qualms with Christmas shopping.
Basu: So, Amanda wants no gifts for the holiday just to be clear.
Mull: Yes. You know, it's fine to buy people gifts, but if you're approaching a gift-giving occasion that what you're doing seems sort of ritualized and rote and like not that exciting for you, not that exciting for the other person, there's a lot of ways to provide people with fun and enjoyment and wonder and joy. And um, most of them, I would posit, don't come from Amazon.
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Basu: Amanda, this was really great. Thank you so much.
Mull: Thank you so much for having me.
Basu, Narrating: Amanda Mull is a columnist for "The Atlantic." We'll link to the story she mentioned about the returns warehouse in our show notes page. And in the spirit of full disclosure, since I recorded this interview, I got two more packages, bringing my weekly total up to 11. At least I'm not returning anything.
If you like what you've been hearing on "Apple News In Conversation," please give us a follow in the Apple Podcasts app and leave us a review. Thanks and happy holidays.
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